


mending

by hoosierbitch



Series: sneakers and sheriff badges [4]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Kid!Fic, Queer Character, Schmoop, light-up sneakers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-16
Updated: 2013-06-16
Packaged: 2017-12-15 03:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/844709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal breaks his arm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mending

**Author's Note:**

> Content Advisory: Allusions to neglect and abuse.
> 
> Notes: This was written for the Whump-a-Palooza fest on whitecollarhc.
> 
> Thanks: I had two wonderful betas for this fic: neontiger55 and embroiderama! All remaining mistakes are my fault. Also, a special shout-out to ivorysilk, who's pretty much the entire reason that this is a 'verse, and not just that-kidfic-I-wrote-that-one-time.

Neal wakes him up before the sun rises, quietly knocking on the open bedroom door.

Peter shakes himself out of sleep and squints at the small figure standing in the hall. “Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”

“Um. Nothing,” Neal says, biting his lip.

“Nothing? Then why are you here?”

“Maybe I got hurt,” Neal says, edging his way back out into the hallway, peering at Peter from around the doorframe.

Peter yawns and rubs the sleep out of his eyes, sitting up on the side of the bed. “Okay. What happened?”

“Never mind,” Neal says, more of his head disappearing around the door, until he’s just a fluff of hair backlit by the Batman nightlight in the hall. “Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“Neal,” Peter says sternly. The fluff of hair freezes. “Get back in here and tell me what’s wrong.”

Neal shuffles back into the doorway, looking tiny in Peter’s old t-shirt. “I fell down,” Neal says, staring at his toes.

El stirs next to Peter. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Neal had a fall,” Peter says, fumbling with the lamp on his bedside table. Elizabeth gets out of bed and walks towards Neal.

“Show me where it hurts,” El says, stepping towards Neal. Neal flinches away from her and both Peter and Elizabeth freeze. Neal hasn’t been doing that nearly as much lately—hardly at all, actually, since his first day of school (and what a fiasco _that_ had turned out to be).

Peter slowly stands up and holds his hands out in front of him so that Neal can see them. “Neal? Come on, bud. Tell us what happened.”

“I fell,” Neal says again. “And—” after another few seconds, he holds out his right arm. Elizabeth gasps, and Peter feels his stomach flip over.

“That looks like it might be broken,” Peter says, as calmly as he can.

“I put ice on it,” Neal says apologetically, sidling behind the doorframe again, his arm—with its bruise and sickening swelling—still held out for their examination.

“You put—Neal, when did you fall?”

“Maybe after story time last night,” Neal says slowly, sensing danger.

“Maybe?” Peter says—or, okay, _yells_ , Peter _yells_ , because Neal’s arm is _broken_ and his t-shirt is damp at the bottom of the sleeve and the body of the shirt looks soaked. Neal had held a bag of ice on his broken arm until it melted. And _then_ he had come to them for help.

That, of course, is what makes Neal cry. Not the broken limb, but Peter yelling at him. Peter is an awful human being. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly. “I’m not mad at you, I promise. We need to get you to the hospital, okay?”

Neal jerks away from them so quickly that he jars his arm, crying out. Peter has to clamp down viciously on his desire to grab Neal to steady him. Intruding on Neal’s personal space right now would not be helpful.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” Neal says, looking from Peter to Elizabeth and back again. “It doesn’t really hurt. Okay? Please?”

He’s pale, and there’s sweat on his forehead, and he’s starting to shake. “We’re going to the hospital,” Elizabeth says, grabbing her keys from the dresser. “And then we’ll come home, and you can watch movies all day with Satch on the couch. Sound good?”

Neal stays silent, giving El a wide berth as she leaves the room. As soon as Elizabeth’s down the stairs Neal’s back in the doorway, staring at Peter with wide, shiny eyes.

“Please,” Neal says, as soon as they’re alone. “I don’t want to. Don’t make me. You said—you said that—you said I get to stay,” Neal says, tears starting to slide down his cheeks. “You said I get to stay until it’s big Neal’s turn to be here.”

“We’re taking you to the hospital because we want you to feel better. That’s it, okay? Then we’re going to come right back home. I promise.” Neal looks at him, his lower lip trembling. Peter doesn’t know what Neal’s looking for, as he searches Peter’s face; he doesn’t know what Neal is so afraid of.

“Promise?”

Peter promises again and carries Neal out to the car.

*

The doctors keep calling Elizabeth and Peter his mom and dad, so Neal keeps having to correct them. “They take care of me,” he tells them. “They’re not my parents.”

He doesn’t tell the doctors that, when he gets older, Peter and Elizabeth are going to be his friends, because right now he doesn’t think that Peter and Elizabeth like him very much. They both look tired and scared and angry and they’re both still in their pajamas, and if Neal takes much longer they won’t have time to take him to school before they go to work. He doesn’t want to be left in the hospital alone all day, even if he is pretty sure that they’d come back for him later.

When he tells the doctor what happened, it feels weird not to lie. “I was bouncing on my bed and then I fell off it.” Before he’d slipped and gone off the edge, it had been _so much fun_. Jamie from school had a trampoline, and she had asked Neal if he wanted to come over sometime to play on it, and he hadn’t asked Peter and Elizabeth for permission yet (because Neal had never bounced on a trampoline before and he’d wanted to practice first to make sure he’d be good at it), and now he’s _never_ going to be able to go to Jamie’s.

He only tells the doctors the basics, though; he knows to keep his mouth shut.

They poke at his arm and it hurts, but it’s only a small hurt, since they gave him some medicine. It’s a dull kind of pain that throbs when he moves. It had—it had hurt a lot, at first. He has tiny cuts inside his cheeks because he had wanted to yell, when it had happened, and that would have woken everybody up, so he had held his mouth as tightly closed as possible. He’s good at being quiet.

After they poke him and give him medicine, the doctors take him to get x-rays. He has to wear a paper nightgown that makes him feel naked, and they won’t let Peter stay in the room with him. (Neal hadn’t even asked, _Peter_ had asked, which means Peter’s not planning on leaving yet.)

After the x-ray they wheel him into a little room and give him two jello cups. He doesn’t like jello, so he gives Peter the red one and Elizabeth the blue one. They clink their cups against Neal’s glass of water and say it’s the best breakfast they’ve ever had.

Neal’s tired; he doesn’t even finish his water before his eyelids start to slip down.

Peter and Elizabeth leave him when the doctor comes, but the door is open, so he hears them talk. He hears that the doctor is worried. _There’s something wrong with Neal_. He’s heard those words, that tone, before. His mom’s not here this time though, to make excuses, and to explain how Neal’s—how he really is just clumsy a lot of the time.

He curls up in his bed into a little, little ball, the same way Satchmo does during storms, and wraps his good arm around his head to block everything else out.

*

“Have you noticed that he’s less afraid here than he was the first time that we brought him to school?” Elizabeth says, as they finish filling out the insurance paperwork at the desk. Neal’s on the FBI’s insurance, but because he’s not related to his temporary guardians, the forms are _endless_.

“Maybe it’s because we’re here with him,” Peter replies.

“As much as I would like that to be true—”

“Yeah. I know.” Neal’s more familiar with the hospital than he was with kindergarten. He pulls Elizabeth in against his left side and leans against her as he signs the last of the papers. She goes to pick them up some coffee, since they’ll have to wait at least an hour before Neal’s cast can be put on.

When Peter gets back to the room, Neal is gone. His sneakers are still there, but the bed’s unmade and the bathroom is empty. Peter checks with the nurses, but Neal hadn’t been taken for more x-rays or any other procedures (and if they had taken his kid away without notifying him, there would have been hell to pay).

He yells for Elizabeth, and within minutes they’re combing the hallways, the nurses radioing between floors.

Peter finds Neal in the stairwell.

“Hey,” he says softly, being careful not to move too quickly. Neal is pale and barefoot, dressed only in the thin paper gown the hospital had provided, and he’s curled himself into the smallest corner he could find. “What are you doing out of bed?”

“There was a lady,” Neal whispers, peering around Peter. “She was—she wanted to take me away.” Peter feels a surge of adrenaline flood through him.

“ _What_? Who—don’t worry, Neal. It was probably a mistake.” Maybe a lab tech, or a doctor—maybe someone from insurance. “No matter what, I am not going to let anyone take you away. I promised you, didn’t I? “

Neal’s “Yes” is quick and reflexive, but it takes him a few more seconds to trust Peter enough to relax into a slightly looser ball.

“What did this woman want?”

“She’s from the—the society—” Neal’s face crinkles. “They have a different name now. Social service?”

“Oh.” That—that explains a lot. He crouches down so that he’s on eye-level with Neal. “I’m sorry that she scared you. It’s her job to make sure that you’re okay and that we’re not hurting you.” The doctor had shown them Neal’s x-rays, to explain the damage that the fall had caused. He’d pointed out the places where there had been previous breaks and fractures. Neal is too young to have a story like that written into his body. Things like that shouldn’t happen to children. “She’s not trying to take you away.”

Neal looks like he’s about to fall asleep, his eyes drooping. “The future’s weird,” he says. _Yeah_ , Peter thinks. It must be weird to have people who care for you, people you can trust, people who make sure you’re not going to get hurt. Peter closes his eyes and resolutely does not think of Neal as he is when he grows up.

“I’m going to pick you up, okay?”

Neal nods and goes boneless against Peter’s side, the drugs or fatigue finally taking over. It’s like picking up a cat—more of a liquid than a solid. Eventually he manages to get Neal draped over his side in a way that allows him to get down steps and maneuver through the doorway.

He passes word through the nursing staff, and Elizabeth meets him at the room and helps him get Neal onto the bed. The woman from Social Services—Sandy, a hawk-like woman with a coffee-stained suit and a heavy briefcase—is waiting for them outside the curtain.

“You’re Peter and Elizabeth Burke? Neal’s guardians?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says, shaking her hand.

“Sorry about the great escape,” Peter says. “He hasn’t had the best experiences with Social Services.”

“Children with histories of physical abuse rarely do.”

For all that she’s obviously trying to throw them off-balance, Peter likes her. She goes over their forms slowly and meticulously, which is understandable, given how rarely she probably comes across them. To say that they’re nonstandard would be an enormous understatement.

She makes a few phone calls, to confirm that the lack of previous documentation for Neal’s injuries (which would have been about twenty years old, and presumably under false names) don’t indicate a pattern of abuse while Neal was under the Burkes’ care.

*

The mean lady from social service is waiting for him when he wakes up. “I’m going to talk to you for a few minutes,” she says, with a smile that Neal knows is fake. “Then they’re probably going to be ready for you to go get a cast put on your arm. Okay?”

He glares at her.

“So, Neal. How did you hurt your arm?”

“I fell.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. It sounds like it probably hurt a lot.” He nods, slowly. “When did this happen?”

“Last night,” he says, trying to figure out what she’s doing.

“Where were Peter and Elizabeth—”

“They weren’t there!”

“Okay,” she says, softly, like she’s trying to play nice. “And when you hurt your arm, what did they do?”

“They…they made me come to the hospital. Even if I really didn’t need to,” he says, wincing when he realizes that he shouldn’t say anything bad about Peter and Elizabeth right now.

“It’s good that they did,” she replies. “The doctors are here to help you feel better. Do you like living with Peter and Elizabeth?”

“Yeah,” he says with a small shrug. “I have a room with a bed. And they have a dog. Um. They’re really nice to me. Just until I go back to my mom,” he says, because he doesn’t want social service to spread the word back to the people who had tried to take him away before. They already don’t like his mom; he doesn’t need to give them more mean things to say about her. Even if they are true.

She asks him more questions, about his room and about school and about how much food he got to eat. He gets three meals every day, he tells her, three meals no matter what.

She gives him a card before she leaves. It has her number on it, and she says he can call her if he ever needs any help. He pretends like he’s going to keep it, and fake-smiles at her when she tells him to feel better.

*

They say that they can make his cast in colors—green or blue or purple or pink—but he asks for white. He likes drawing on his casts, and he’s got tons of people now who he’s going to ask to sign it for him.

He falls asleep in the car on the way back to the house, but wakes up when Peter puts him down on the couch in the living room. “I’m too big,” he protests sleepily, because only little kids get carried around.

“You’re Neal-sized,” Peter says, putting a blanket on top of him. “You’ll never be too big for me to carry you.”

*

Peter goes to work, but Elizabeth stays home with him. She draws on the parts of the cast that he can’t reach. She doodles funny faces, and draws a picture of Satchmo that actually looks more like a horse than a dog (but he doesn’t tell her that).

“Is it going to be lots of money?” he asks her, when she gets back from a long conversation on her phone. He knows that Yvonne is someone that Elizabeth works with, and that Elizabeth is supposed to be at work now; it’s Neal’s fault she’s missing it. You can’t get paid if you don’t work.

“Is what going to be—going to cost a lot of money?”

“Me,” he says, scrunching his toes into the couch cushion. “And my arm.”

She sighs and sits down next to him. “I bet when you were with your mom that sometimes you didn’t have enough money. Right?”

He stares at his toes and doesn’t say anything.

“It must have been very hard for you both,” she says, putting her arm around his shoulders carefully, as if his arm weren’t already wrapped up, as if his hurts were visible. “Peter and I have been very lucky to get jobs that pay us very well. We can afford this house, and food for all of us, and we can pay for your hospital bills. We’re not going to run out of money because of you. You don’t have to worry about it. Let us do that. It’s grownups’ job to worry about money; it’s your job to get better.”

It’s also his job to help walk Satchmo and make sure that Peter doesn’t forget his reading glasses when he reads and to draw a new picture for the fridge at least once a week.

“When I get big—do I have a job? And have money?”

“Yeah,” she says, after a pause that makes him think maybe he doesn’t. “You take care of yourself very well. But we help sometimes. Because we’re friends—we’re family. And that’s what families do.”

Neal burrows between Elizabeth and the couch, until he’s wrapped in a soft dark embrace that makes him feel safe and comfy. “Gonna nap for a bit,” he decides.

“Sleep tight,” she says, patting his back. She doesn’t leave. When her phone rings, she turns it off. She plays a movie real quiet, one that’s not in English. Neal doesn’t actually sleep. He just keeps his eyes closed tight, his body curled around his broken arm, protected by Elizabeth’s presence.

He got hurt and they took care of him. He’s like Satchmo now, he realizes. If he gets sick, or hurt, or—or if he runs away. They’re going to find him and be nice to him and take him back home.

He cries, real quiet, into the couch cushions, tears leaking out beneath his scrunched up eyelids. Soon—probably before his cast comes off, before he’s fixed—he’s going to have to go back to his mom. He can feel the light threaten sometimes, feel it shoot through his arms and legs, getting him ready to travel back through time. It hurts in a way that is worse than when his arm had crumpled beneath him, even in the first few seconds after he’d hit the floor, when the disjointed pain—the sense that something about him was _wrong_ —had shot through his body.

He can’t stay here. In this nice house, with Peter and Elizabeth who have enough money to take care of him and who like him enough to make sure that he’s never scared.

He’s scared now, even though Elizabeth’s next to him and Satchmo’s on the floor right in front of him. He’s scared and he’s sad at the same time.

He crosses his fingers and wishes, wishes as hard as he can (even though it’s selfish and mean and stupid), that he will not have to leave.

_Please_.

He does not want to leave.


End file.
